Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
by KnightNight7203
Summary: "Tony wakes with tingling fingers and a knot on the back of his head, and thinks, Oh, I'm alive." In which the Avengers make a rule, Peter makes a choice, and time travel really complicates things. Endgame compliant but not accepting. Contains many spoilers.
1. Chapter 1

Tony wakes with tingling fingers and a knot on the back of his head, and thinks, _Oh, I'm alive._

How nice.

It takes a lot of energy, that thought. His head is _aching_, and there's this muted, persistent ringing in his ears, and he can't focus long enough to string ideas together for more than a few seconds at a time. He feels consciousness start to dribble away. He drifts. And then the thought comes back.

_I'm alive._

Only, that doesn't make sense, now does it.

The longer he's awake (is he awake? Is that what this drifting is?) the more he remembers. Also, the less he understands.

1\. Thanos was back.

2\. Thanos had the infinity stones once more.

3\. He transferred the stones to his own arm.

4\. He was raising his fingers, about to snap.

The memories have all the clarity of a dull oozing sludge, but he knows they're real, and each one sends a little tendril of ice shooting down his aching, tingling spine.

There's a new thought festering now, and it's not as nice. In fact, it leaves his stomach churning—he can't remember the last time he ate, but if it was recently, he might be about to puke everything right back up.

_It didn't work._

He's been getting pretty well acquainted with failure these past few years, but repeated exposure doesn't make this particular realization any easier to swallow. And he'd been convinced by the end that, win or lose, he wouldn't have to see the aftermath of this one either way.

He snaps, he dies. Thanos snaps, he dies. At any rate, that's certainly what he would have preferred.

But when does he ever get what he wants?

He drifts again. This time, he lets all the thoughts go.

* * *

Tony stirs once more, and this time, he thinks of Pepper.

He thinks of drifting through space, rescue uncertain, survival uncertain, everything uncertain but her. Her face as she watched him stumble off that ship. The smell of her hair after days and days gulping only stale, dwindling recycled oxygen. Pepper, coming into her own as CEO. Pepper, dancing with him on a rooftop. Reaching out across the pillow to run her fingers through his hair. Learning to operate the suit, to fly, to fire, like it's an extension of her own body. Waking with the baby. Shooting flames out of her hands. Standing across the kitchen, watching him dry the dishes, with that little smile quirking the corners of her mouth as he thinks what he knows she's thinking too: after everything, they deserve this. Just this.

God, they've been through so much together. What a goddamn shame—the tragedy of the age—to lose it all now.

There's a moment—just a fraction of a second—where he lets himself think of Morgan, too. But that leaves his chest tight and his head screaming, and so he stops that right away.

What has he done?

"We got lucky." That's Pepper's voice, distant as a dream, ringing in his ears. He can see her face, eyes calculating, optimistic, afraid. She'd wanted him to try—but only because he had wanted it, too? Or because she had faith that he would succeed?

_We got lucky._

Another thought, one that was already frothing through his veins when his consciousness started to return: There's no way he'll have been so lucky this time.

He's aware enough to run a quick assessment: fingers wiggle, toes twitch, and the pounding in his head is more localized, manageable now. If he wanted to, he could open his eyes, probably take a stroll around … wherever he is. A soot-scarred, blood-soaked field.

But he's tired of tear-streaked faces. He's tired of letting people down. And he's so goddamn tired of that ugly-ass grape giant, with his huge fists and cold eyes and that eerie, unwavering conviction that his way of utter devastation is right and just. Tony doesn't want to wake up to that.

No, he just wants to lie here and think of Pepper, and live in the liminal dream world where he is alive and she is alive and they have a beautiful, joyful, perfect daughter. Where his reckless, stupid plan didn't give the universe all the ammunition it needed to whisk it all away.

And then he hears it: "Tony. Open your eyes."

That's Pepper's voice again. It's not a dream, though.

It's real.

So he opens his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Six weeks earlier.

* * *

It's impossible to assist with the recovery efforts without hearing whispers of time travel.

That's right: Time. Travel. Traveling through time. Getting in a future-y machine and flipping a switch and coming out somewhere and some-when far far away, like something out of a movie.

To be completely honest, Peter's mind is already completely overwhelmed at the mere thought of anything vaguely temporal. Because—oh yeah—apparently, he's been gone for _five years_.

How the hell is he supposed to know how to think about that?

The future is weird; there's a lot going on. Apparently, Thanos won, then Thanos disappeared, then Thanos died, then he came back. The good guys almost got the infinity stones and then lost them and then found them and then lost them, and now they have them again. Some people he knows have returned and some he didn't stayed dead, and some are completely different versions of the same person. Thor and Captain America are back on the team, and Black Panther and his cool sister hang out with them now. There's a new, awesome glowing lady. Also, Ant Man, who is not usually giant, likes to get really tiny and hop through different dimensions or something using a dirty old van.

So there's all that, and then there's this: he's been gone, completely winked out of existence, for five whole years.

For him, it … it hadn't felt like five years. Not exactly. He remembers watching the others go, and remembers the pinching and searing in his own body as something happened—as his skin and bones crumbled like a sandcastle abandoned in the sun? As his atoms broke down into dust? Maybe the pain and panic was his super senses or healing factor screaming a warning. Maybe it was a deeper intuition, the reaction even a normal person would have in these particular nightmarish conditions. The others had disappeared so fast, he hadn't gotten a read on their faces—but either way, it sucked. _Sucked_.

And then he remembers waking up.

At first he thought he'd only passed out. He'd overreacted; there was some Star Trek beaming action going on, or maybe a Princess and the Frog-type situation, but nobody was disintegrating to death. That was crazy!

But then his head felt weird and fuzzy, kind of like coming out of anesthesia. He looked down at his hands and saw blurry fingertips, as if the first bits to go were the last to return. At first, when he moved unexpectedly, random nerves throughout his body screamed like they'd forgotten how to human. Then, to top it all off, Mr. Stark had vanished, along with the ship and the angry blue lady, and worse, there's no sign—no footprints, no wheel tracks, no scorched dirt from the engines—that they had ever been there in the first place.

"We've been gone for five years," Dr. Strange said slowly from somewhere behind him, a wild, nonsensical sentence that's still kind of blowing his mind.

And then this.

Time travel is possible; just as real, at least, as a giant purple alien with a god complex, an actual god with a magic hammer and an eye stolen by a talking raccoon, and and a seventeen-year-old boy disintegrating into dust even as he cries. Apparently Mr. Stark had solved it, just like Mr. Stark solved the dust problem. Just like he solved everything.

And now, another thing: Mr. Stark is gone.

* * *

In the beginning, he hadn't believed he was dead.

Everything happened so fast. There was the fight, and the explosions, old faces, new faces, his face being ground into the dirt. His eye was swollen, blood was streaming from his nose, and he couldn't see through the dust swirling thick in the air. He had the gauntlet. The New Glowing Lady took the gauntlet. Thanos had the gauntlet (oh God, Thanos had the gauntlet). And then Mr. Stark had the gauntlet.

_A snap._

_A burst of light._

_If Peter never smelled searing flesh and burning hair ever again, it would be far, far too soon._

He felt the wave of sheer power wash over him; they all did, he could see it in their faces. It very nearly sent him tumbling into the dirt. He had to choke back a panicked sob as ash started to fill the air—it was only the bad guys who were disappearing, Mr. Stark obviously wouldn't hurt anyone else, but knowing that and _knowing_ it were two very different things. The air tasted chalky. The silence was heavy and hung over the ruined field like a cloud. It was done.

And Mr. Stark had stood there, looking over the scene of his victory, except his eyes weren't really focusing on the scene. And then his expression went slack and his knees were buckling and he was on the ground.

Peter was on the ground too for some reason; he must have been, because he crawled to him. He talked without really saying anything, filling the silence with the sound of his voice, because it was the only thing he knew to do. All he wanted was for Mr. Stark to look at him. He didn't even have to say anything back. He just had to look at him, _see_ him, and maybe smile.

If he could just smile, Peter would know things were going to be okay.

"Please," Peter whispered, tears slipping down his dirty cheeks. Mr. Stark just listed further sideways, the unmarred side of his face twitching, eyes moving back and forth under half-closed lids.

Miss Potts appeared, gently lifted Peter out of the way, and crouched in front of him. She whispered to him, pleaded with F.R.I.D.A.Y. Standing over them, Peter lost the ability to think and he found his heart swooping somewhere low in his stomach. This was worse than turning to dust.

When Mr. Stark's hand fell limply at his side, it felt like the whole world was ending all over again.

But Miss Potts—Miss Potts was smiling. She was crying, but she was smiling, and as the armor retracted from around her hand and she stroked Mr. Stark's face with her fingertips, she was talking to him like he was still there.

He remembers that. He remembers thinking: Miss Potts wouldn't be smiling if he was dead.


	3. Chapter 3

How about that Far From Home trailer, huh?

Many thanks to everyone who's read and commented so far! Now that I'm done with school (I have a masters degree now?) I should be posting pretty frequent updates over the next few days.

* * *

Peter trails after Bruce Banner (_Bruce Banner!_), who's on some kind of quest to salvage elusive time machine parts, because he isn't sure what else to do.

Something he's quickly realizing is that he doesn't actually know where they are. The murky, roiling sky is a shade of grey that suggests there might be blue somewhere underneath, and he thinks he sees the ruins of some regular cars mangled under rocket casings and space ship debris on the ground, so his best guess—his desperate hope—is that this is Earth. But even then, he can't begin to imagine what part. It _looks_ alien. All he knows is that there was a glowing doorway leading to a random battlefield, that Mr. Stark was there, and that he jumped right through—like an idiot.

And now Dr. Strange and his magic wizard hands have disappeared somewhere, and the space ships are all broken (as if he'd be able to work one anyway), and so he's stuck right where he is.

Five years in the future.

He wants to get away. He wants to go home. But he's realized something else as well—with everything that has changed on the superhero side of things, he can't fathom what life is like everywhere else on Earth.

He doesn't know if May disappeared, like him, or if she's spent the last five years thinking he was dead. Maybe she was doing something dangerous when the snap happened, like driving in a car or crossing the street, and somebody crashed into her. Maybe she couldn't deal without him—he's pretty sure she wouldn't take her own life, but she's already been through so much. Or maybe, without a friendly neighborhood Spider-man to patrol the streets, she got killed by a mugger or a gang member or some other criminal enjoying his newfound freedom.

Maybe Ned is in college. Maybe MJ has graduated early from law school. Maybe nobody even remembers who he was or why they loved him, and Mr. Stark, the one person who cared enough to do something about his dusting, has gone and left him completely alone in the world.

That's so terrifying that he has to stop and focus on his breathing for a second. He hunches over, lightheaded, and feels Dr. Banner pat him gently on the shoulder with his good hand.

"Don't worry, Spider-man," he says, his voice low and soothing. "It's gonna be okay."

Just listening to his voice, Peter almost believes it. But when he straightens and catches a glimpse of his face, there's still concern and frustration and a little desperation there.

"We won." Maybe Dr. Banner sees the lingering panic in Peter's eyes, because he tries again. "Nothing else bad is going to happen. It's all downhill from here."

Peter nods hesitantly. Then someone calls Dr. Banner's name from across a big crater, and he turns away.

There's a hollered conversation. Peter tries to keep track, and hears something about magic particles and a special GPS. Dr. Banner's entire demeanor changes, more hopeful now, and he starts walking briskly to retrieve these items.

"I'll just … tag along," Peter mutters under his breath, and he takes off too, jogging a little to keep up with Dr. Banner's new and improved hulk-y legs.

He's really not _just_ tagging along. He's basically imprinted like a baby duckling. But in his defense, he doesn't know very many people here. Dr. Strange freaks him out a little, seems really important, and is obviously extremely preoccupied. That Starlord guy's references annoy him, and he's been chasing desperately after a green lady and ignoring everyone else, anyway. Peter can't even find Miss Natasha, who at least acted like she cared when she used to train with him—and he's been looking for her really, _really_ hard.

Then there's Miss Potts, who is busy and distracted and he would never ever want to bother her because … because she just lost Mr. Stark, and he doesn't even know how she's still standing. He barely is, after all.

He feels hollow, like something inside of him was ripped out and dragged away. He wants someone to pick him up and hold him and tell him everything will be okay. He wants _May_. But Dr. Banner has fought alongside him (kind of) once before, hasn't yelled at him yet today, and probably doesn't want him to die, so this might be the best option he has right now.

"Excuse me Dr. Banner, Mr. Hulk, sir?" he asks when they halt over a pile of smoldering metal wreckage, his voice the embarrassing, high-pitched squeak of a child. "Do you think you could catch me up a little on what's been happening here, please?"

He's genuinely curious, and genuinely concerned, but there's an ulterior motive here, too. If he acts calm—if he works out what's going on and where he is and what he has to do to help—maybe then they'll let him see Mr. Stark again.

* * *

When they went to move him—when Miss Potts and Captain America and the New Glowing Lady closed his eyes and laid him down on a strip of fabric and started to lift his body off the dark muddy ground—Peter pretty much lost his shit.

He'd been sitting with him, keeping watch, not really doing anything much except trying to keep breathing. _In and out. In and out_. Miss Potts had been sitting there, too. He still couldn't figure out how she looked almost peaceful when he could barely get a handle on his gasping sobs.

She was holding Mr. Stark's hand. Peter's nose was dripping—blood? snot? something wet, anyway—onto his boot. He kept a close eye on Captain America in between sniffles—he still didn't quite trust that guy, not after Berlin, and he didn't like the way he kept looking over here with a brooding expression on his face.

And then the captain came towards them, along with New Glowing Lady, and they murmured to Miss Potts and gently brushed Peter aside. They scooped up Mr. Stark. In seconds, he'd figured it out: they were taking him away.

There wasn't anything to say—what _could_ he say when it honestly made sense to move him away from this soggy pit of death and destruction? So Peter didn't say anything.

Instead, he screamed.

He was crying. He _definitely_ wasn't breathing anymore. Still, he took off after them, not getting too close so he didn't jostle them—he didn't want Mr. Stark to fall onto the ground—but staying just close enough, because he didn't want to lose them, either. He staggered, tripping over debris on the ground. Miss Potts stepped away from the body—she looked like she was going to reach for Peter—but now she was breaking down too.

That wasn't right. He didn't want to upset her. But everything was wrong, and he couldn't stop screaming.

In the end, Dr. Strange had to hold him back—he was literally in the air, Strange's arms around his middle keeping him six inches off the ground—as Mr. Stark got further and further away, suspended between Miss Potts and Captain America and New Glowing Lady. He watched her shimmering form until they were so far away that the ash in the air and the crests of craters completely blocked them from view.

"Where are they taking him?" he choked out, because he had to know. He couldn't stand the thought of him alone, cold, damp from the rain that was starting to fall and wash away the little hollow where his body had been. They had taken Ben away, and he'd never seen him again. He'd never even gotten to say goodbye to his parents. Mr. Stark couldn't be like that. He couldn't lose him, too.

"He'll be somewhere safe," Strange said, and he left it at that. But nowhere seemed safe to Peter. What if another space ship came and rained rocket blasts down from the sky? What if the water rose again and washed everything away? Who had the gauntlet? What if it wasn't safe? There was literally no way to know that every possible danger had passed.

Well, Mr. Stark would know. But now he'd never know anything again.

* * *

It's only been about three hours since the battle ended, but Peter has learned quickly that he can't stop and think about these horrible things any more. One time a few minutes ago, when he was helping a really tall warrior lady from Wakanda pry her shield out of the side of a metal snake thing, he started desperately sobbing in front of Black Panther himself. He's feeling a lot of emotions right now, but the one that bubbled up to the surface during that little misadventure was shame. Plenty of people lost someone really close to them. If they're being technical, he barely even knew Mr. Stark.

He can't get the broken look in Miss Potts's eyes out of his mind. She'd been fine until she saw him freak out, and he feels _terrible_.

So he thinks about time travel instead.

Dr. Banner, kind, patient green person that he is, talks him through the basics as they gather the remnants of what was once Mr. Stark's impossible machine. Peter learns about the quantum realm, the time GPS Mr. Stark designed, and the so-called _time heist_ that the remaining Avengers had scrambled together in the midst of a life-changing revelation.

"What about, like, paradoxes and things?" Peter asks, trying just a little to sound smarter than he actually is. "You know—go back and kill your grandfather, so you're never born, so you never go back and kill your grandfather? Not that I'd ever want to, um, kill my grandfather, but—"

Dr. Banner shakes his head. "Not true at all," he explains, interrupting Peter's rambling. He starts gesturing with his hands, trying to draw the science out in the air. "This is how I think of it: if you go back in time, your past becomes your present, and your present, your past. You think you've changed directions, maybe, but _your_ timeline is still linear."

"And the changes? Like—Cap fought himself. 2014 is literally _missing_ Thanos."

"Alternate timelines," Dr. Banner says. "New branches—new dimensions, even—that have nothing to do with us and what we've already gone through. Multiverse stuff, maybe. That's all still theoretical."

Peter thinks about that. The fact that _any_ of this is no longer just theoretical is so hard to wrap his head around.

"So … anything you do in the past … doesn't affect our present?" he asks. "Not at all?"

"It affects _other_ futures," Dr. Banner says. "That's why it's so important that I return the infinity stones. But as for us—we're all locked in. It's impossible to change your own history."

"That's wild," Peter says. But it's a bit more than that.

Time travel is possible.

Not only that, time travel isn't dangerous or otherwise catastrophic.

In the back of his mind, he feels the tickle of a hint of the barest beginnings of a plan.


	4. Chapter 4

Present day.

* * *

Pepper and Morgan and Happy are crowded around the hospital bed, and Peter feels weird even being here, so he's been sitting in the corner. He's trying not to watch and doing a really bad job of it. It's probably fine, though—nobody's paid him a second glance since he got back an hour and a half ago.

God, it's been an hour and a half. An hour and a half since everything changed. He doesn't know how much longer he can wait for something—_anything_—to happen, especially considering everything that's happened—everything he's done—to get to this point.

The monitors say that Tony's been pretty much conscious for about six minutes now, but he has yet to open his eyes. He has yet to even twitch, actually—it's like he's taunting them or something. Pepper's being incredibly patient, one hand lightly rubbing his arm and the other stroking Morgan's hair, but there's a look on her face that suggests she might resort to light strangling if he doesn't get his act together soon.

"Come on, Tony," she says, voice strained. "Open your eyes."

Suddenly Happy shakes himself, then pushes back away from the bed. "I can't do this," he says, voice stiff. "Let him know I was here; I'll be back."

Pepper tries to protest, but he waves her away.

"I need to see his eyes open," he says, and nobody argues, because they're basically all feeling it too. "Right now, he just looks—" But he glances at Morgan and doesn't finish that sentence.

He casts one long look back at Tony, expression carefully neutral but tears dancing in the corners of his eyes. Then he leaves, carefully shutting the door with a click behind him.

Pepper pulls Morgan closer and sighs.

Quiet as can be, probably not even understanding what's going on, Morgan blinks slowly. One of her hands is tangled in the blankets draped across the bed, and the other is stuffed in her mouth. She hadn't sucked her thumb before all this; it started right around the time of the funeral. Part of Peter had really hoped she'd stop again now—he knows firsthand how much the inevitable braces suck—but it's probably a little early to expect such a big change. After all, Tony hasn't even woken up yet.

Off in the corner where he lurks, slowly suffocating under the weight of his conscience, Peter's hands are both clasped in his lap. If he let go, stopped squeezing desperately, he thinks they'd shake so hard they'd rattle apart.

Or disintegrate. Blow away on the nonexistent breeze.

Pepper breathes slowly—in and out, in and out, the perfect picture of a forced, deceptive calm. Morgan blinks. Peter squirms.

But finally, after an hour and thirty seven minutes—six months—an eternity—Tony opens his eyes.

He looks … disoriented, at first. Between the fog of unconsciousness still lingering behind his eyes and the dimness of the room, lit only by the screens of the instruments measuring his vitals, he takes a minute to focus. His fists open and close around the blankets draped over his legs, feeling the texture and imagining the context, trying to place himself in space and time. He coughs a little as he tastes the air, stale and cool, free of the expected dust and fear and death.

Then Pepper's hand finds his. His wild gaze lands on her face. "Hey, Pep," he breathes, and tiny sob wrenches its way free from Pepper's throat as she grips him so hard her fingers turn white.

Peter has to look away.

He glances back just in time to watch Morgan slowly crawl onto the bed and into Tony's lap. She sits facing him, one hand on each shoulder, head tilted just a bit as she stares silently into his eyes. Peter can't see her expression, but he figures it's equally skeptical and challenging and finally happy—she has a way of packing a lot of emotions into a tiny, tiny face. There's silence as she considers him, taking it all in.

"You are in big trouble, Mister," she says finally, and Peter can tell just from her tone that this is something he's said often—jokingly, he's sure—to her. Tony laughs abruptly and shortly, like he's surprised himself at the sound, and then immediately crushes her to his chest.

"I thought I was never gonna see you again," he whispers against her, meeting Pepper's eyes over her tiny brunette head, and then Pepper's on the bed too and they're all crying and whispering and acting like such a perfect heroic family that Peter doesn't even know what to do. Five years ago, the Tony he knew would have probably gagged at the thought of being vulnerable like this—whether because of his past in the harsh spotlight, his own far-from-perfect father, or his history of getting stabbed in the back by friends, he had a habit of cloaking any rogue emotion in sarcasm or squashing it down into an abyss of insomnia and self-loathing. Even as young and naive as he'd been then, Peter had seen that. He'd even imitated it, on occasion.

But now Tony leans into it, wears affection and relief like a life vest keeping him afloat out at sea. It suits him in a way Peter realizes he wasn't at all prepared for. It was one thing to hear about Tony being a husband and a father, to see Pepper and Morgan talk about him fondly and move carefully around the void he left in their lives. It's quite another to see him step back into the role as if no time has passed, comfortable and oh so capable. Peter can't wrap his head around it.

He loses track of what's happening as he ponders. He can't hear them anymore—he redirects his super-hearing because he doesn't think he should be able to eavesdrop on this moment. They deserve this happiness, this togetherness; he does not, certainly not now. Honestly, he'd leave if he didn't think it would distract them from the moment, and if he could force his tired limbs to move.

And so time moves strangely and irregularly, like a clogged hourglass or a slide coated in molasses. But after a while—minutes, hours, maybe a day—Pepper gathers a drowsy Morgan close and slides her feet back down to the floor.

"Get some rest," she says at a regular volume, the sound ringing in Peter's ears. Tony nods, reaching out to run his fingers along Morgan's arm one more time, and then Pepper makes to leave.

On her way out the door, she comes over to Peter and squeezes his clasped hands.

"I'm not going to ask too many questions about what you've done," she says. He shrugs—that's probably a good idea. He's not sure it'll save him from the consequences, but he appreciates the thought.

"Okay," he says dully.

She shakes her head and squeezes harder. "Thank you, Peter. _Thank you_."

The sincerity in her voice dazzles him; he practically sees stars. How could she be grateful to _him_ when this is only just the least he could do?

"You don't need to thank me," he says, but she's already turning away. With one last lingering look at Tony, she shifts Morgan to her hip and leaves the room.

Deep in the corner, so still he might have been a statue, Peter stays.

* * *

"So, you've been quiet."

Peter starts, raising his head. Tony reclines in the bed, looking far too leisurely for someone who's been dead for six weeks, even taking into account the pinched corners of his mouth and the way something dark dances behind his eyes. There's something so _Tony_ about the tilt of his head, the quirk of his eyebrows, the way he's teasing and concerned all at once.

Peter can hardly stand it.

He wants to say something—starts to, even—but any and all words get stuck in his throat.

"Come on, kid," Tony says, sitting up a little now. "I wait five years for a decent conversation with you and you let a cat get ahold of your tongue now?"

"Five years?" Peter splutters, and yup, there's his voice. He doesn't remember it being so strangled, but he'll take what he can get. "Do you know how long _you've_ been gone?"

A hint of discomfort flashes across Tony's face. "Pepper said some … six weeks?" He is clearly aiming for nonchalance, but lands somewhere eerily flat instead.

"Six weeks," Peter confirms, trying to force stubborn tears away. He stands suddenly, tentatively takes just a few steps closer.

When Tony speaks again, his voice is so soft Peter can barely hear it. "Not that it's a competition, but six weeks is hardly five years, Pete."

"I wasn't ready to lose anyone else," Peter says, voice breaking, and then he's running forward, collapsing on the bed, arms around Tony's middle and tears staining the front of his hospital gown. Tony pats his back, and once upon a time this might have been awkward, but he's had training now—thanks to Morgan whipping him into shape, he might just be the most comforting person out there.

Well. Maybe not more comforting than May. But pretty close, at least.

Because his silence was making Tony suspicious—or maybe just because it's been so long—he starts talking as he sits up, because that's what he does in situations like this. "I have so much to tell you now that you're back," he rambles, gearing up to babble until he's cut off. "I'm sort of friends with Ant Man now—I know you don't like him but you have to admit he's kinda cool—and _Bruce Banner_ helps me with my homework sometimes. Not that he could replace you. But he's still great. And we have to talk about your kid, because she's a menace—" _Don't say anything about time travel_, his inner monologue reminds him as he talks. _Don't say anything about time travel._

But before he has the chance to betray himself, Tony shakes his head and shushes him. "Five years," he says softly, letting his eyes sweep slowly over his face, "and you haven't changed one bit."

If only he knew.

"I mean, lots of things have changed," Peter says vaguely, because that could mean a lot of things. It was true even before. "So many things are different now, different than they were…"

He trails off. He still doesn't like to talk about the snap.

Tony nods sharply, a more businesslike expression on his face. "Pepper said we won this time?"

"We did," Peter says immediately, forcefully, because it's good to remember the feeling of watching Thanos and his minions disappear, seeing people reunited with their families, especially amid everything else that's happened since. "The universe is safe, because of you."

"I stopped Thanos?"

Peter nods. "You did."

"And then…"

_And then._

Peter could kick himself; he should have been ready for that question. Tony was calculating, scientific, like him; of course he'd need to know the details: how the gauntlet worked, who all disappeared, what they'd done with it, what they'd done since. But he'd been so focused on this moment that he hadn't prepared for anything after.

"And … and then?"

"I don't remember using the gauntlet," Tony says, frowning. "I certainly don't remember what came next. But what I really can't work my brain around is how I survived, and survived apparently _unscathed_, but didn't wake up here until six weeks later."

Oh, _shit_.

"SHIELD stuff," Peter says shortly, shrugging and hoping that's the end of it. Apparently he's decided to bet everything on the fact that SHIELD gets away with basically whatever, and that Tony has remained stubbornly insistent on paying approximately zero attention to their many distasteful activities. "Cutting-edge medical intervention. I only understand the basics—not a lot of people were allowed to know."

"People think I'm dead?"

"The whole world thinks you're dead."

Tony grins suddenly. "I guess I could get used to that."

Peter doesn't know how to tell him that a world where Tony Stark is dead—real or just apparently—is not a world many people are actually happy living in.

Suddenly Tony runs his thumb down Peter's grimy cheek. There's fondness in his expression, of course, but confusion, too. "Hey kid—if the battle ended weeks ago, what's with all the dirt?"

And, oh yeah.

An hour and a half and he didn't even think to rinse his face off.

"You know Queens," Peter says, unable to stop himself from looking away. "There's always something going down. I came right over from patrol when I heard you were waking up."

He's lucky they've been apart for so long. Five years ago, Tony would have immediately known he was lying.

Even so, Tony looks bothered, either by what he said or how he said it. "Peter—" he begins, but Peter jolts off the bed, nearly tripping over himself in his sudden haste to get away.

"Speaking of Queens, I'd probably better get back," he says, scrambling for an excuse—any excuse. "People to save, dinner to eat, don't want to keep May waiting—"

He waves a quick goodbye, ignoring Tony's protests. As he stumbles into the hall, he nearly collides with Happy, who stares at him long and hard before making his way into Tony's room.

"What was that?" he hears Tony ask.

He doesn't stick around long enough to hear Happy's answer.


	5. Chapter 5

**My chapters are getting longer and longer and if I'm not careful the next one will be like a whole novella**

**In other news, how about Far From Home, huh?!**

**This is obviously a quite different timeline, but I would still like to say I'm very much operating under the assumption that May was not snapped.**

**(Also, the blip? No thanks.)**

* * *

Six weeks earlier.

* * *

May literally drives through the battlefield to get to Peter.

Well, it's not quite a battlefield anymore. There's a notable absence of enemy troops, and the only remaining explosions are contained, purposefully triggered by the Falcon and the Winter Soldier as they destroy any remaining alien tech before the inevitable arrival of actual government officials. Several beings—notably the talking raccoon, Ant-Man, and a spindly, irritable tree-like creature—have found reasonably sheltered places to doze off. Doctor Strange has erected some kind of makeshift dam from the rubble to keep the gradually settling waves of the lake at bay.

So, May actually drives through a dusty, mournful campground of sorts to reach Peter. She only has to swerve a few times, and her car only gets stuck in the mud twice. But there are craters, bloodstains, and disgruntled heroes everywhere, the thick, choking fog still lingering from the Second Dusting is heavy in the air, and every so often an agonized scream echoes, when someone finds a loved one or teammate buried, lifeless, under twisted metal and burning rubber. So it's still quite the gesture, and plenty scary, especially for someone who's probably never even witnessed a fight before.

And anyway, no one who sees the expression on her face as she drives would dare question whether or not she'd cross a far more dangerous combat zone for her child.

She would. She definitely would.

In that moment—with so many people gone and so many of his fears irreversibly brought to life already—Peter is so, so glad she doesn't have to.

* * *

In the end, he thinks, she finds them because of the news crews.

According to Colonel Rhodes' shouted updates, the Marines are still twenty minutes away, the Air Force scrambling to muster some kind of posterior upper-atmosphere defense, when the first broadcast helicopters appear overhead. Somebody with a still-functioning AI yells that they've actually been hovering just out of range of the fight since right after Thanos started blowing shit up, long before anyone who could do something to help bothered to notice what was going on. There's something vaguely funny there, but Peter can't quite piece it together.

As it is, his mask reforms around his face just before he consciously realizes the helicopters are there. There's a moment of panic as the small vehicles blot out the dim light of the sun, as he struggles to take a breath through the nanotech suddenly cradling his face, and he goes to claw it away, but—no, protecting his identity is important. These guys aren't aliens, but they're also not exactly on his side. He has to think ahead. He has to remember, not just the feeling of Thanos slamming him into the ground and the sound of Mr. Stark's heartbeat stopping, but the long game here. His mission. His responsibility. His neighborhood.

If he even has a neighborhood left.

There's that other panic again—the deeper one, the kind that halfhearted breathing exercises don't seem to do much about. He fixes his gaze on a helicopter plastered with NBC logos, watching it circle. Back and forth. He's alive. Back and forth. The world is saved—mostly. Back and forth. No sense in worrying about anything that can't be helped at this point, right?

After a while, someone who can fly goes up to politely scold and/or threaten the reporters, and the helicopters fly far enough away that he feels comfortable removing the mask again. But even as they disappear from view, they're on his mind.

He can only imagine what the newscasters are saying. Have they already told the world Thanos is gone? That Mr. Stark is dead? Have people figured out that the snap's been reversed?

One thing's for sure—amid the interesting stuff like alien risk factors and Wakandan politics and breakdowns of the Sokovia Accords that people love to talk about after disasters like this, they definitely cover the fact that Spider-Man is back in business, too. Because not quite four hours have passed since the end of the fight when an achingly familiar car screeches to a halt across a crater from Peter. May is screaming for him before she's even unbuckled her seatbelt.

Peter trips his way to her—even if he was thinking clearly enough to remember his web shooters, there isn't really anything stable enough to swing from out here right now. He still can't breathe and his legs wobble, so it takes him longer than it should. But once he reaches her none of that matters, because she's holding him close, holding him up, and he feels as safe and comforted as he imagined earlier when he desperately wished she was here.

Is that him shaking? Or her? He can't even tell.

"How are you here?" he asks finally, over the soft, calming repetition of her murmuring his name again and again. "How did you get here?"

When she registers the question, she frowns at him. "I drove?" With a little cough, she drops to the ground, pulling him with her so he's half on her lap. He feels like a five year old, exhausted and clingy. His suit is squeezing places that aren't meant to be squeezed, and the metallic material is definitely jabbing into May's arms. Still, he can't bring himself to care about any of those things.

Finally, he can breathe.

Above him, May is still talking. "Getting out of the city was hell, with all the new people still popping back up randomly on the roads, but I was already on the highway by the time they got anybody official down to regulate—"

"Wait." There's still something missing, something he can't place. "Where—where are we?"

May catches her breath, stifles a sob. "Sweetie. This is the Avengers compound, upstate."

Oh. So. Not only are they on Earth, but they're in New York.

At the compound, where he once—five years ago—had a room.

At the compound, where Mr. Stark's work was safely kept in a lab.

At the compound which is now destroyed, everything that was his and Mr. Stark's obliterated to rubble, scattering the charred ground.

That's a lot to unpack in that revelation, so he doesn't even try. Instead, he looks up at May, at her thin, blotchy, beautiful face, the dark circles under her eyes, the way she's studying him tenderly, gently, as if she wants to protect him more now than ever before. He doesn't get it. "Aren't you mad at me?" he whispers, voice thick with tears. He's overwhelmed by the feeling that she should be.

May blinks, completely thrown off guard. "Mad? Peter, why would I be mad?"

There are so many things he could name, things they never really talked about as much as they should. He lied about being a superhero. He risked his life over and over again. He didn't trust her. He didn't trust himself to keep her safe. Ben died. He thought he could save the world. Everything between them feels damaged, ruined.

Eventually he settles on the most recent issue. "Because I went to space?"

She stares at him, eyes full of an emotion he can't quite place, then shakes her head. "Honey, that was—no, that was a long time ago. I've had time to—I'm not mad. Everything's okay now."

Something inside him crumples at those words—and he hadn't thought there was anything uncrumpled left. But even as this conversation turned darker and more emotional, even as more clues emerged, he'd been operating under the desperate assumption that she had also been snapped. That she'd reappeared and immediately come to find him, worried about the fight and the fight alone, unaware that any significant amount of time had gone by.

But now—_oh god_—that's obviously not true.

After losing his parents, her own parents—after losing _Ben_—she'd had to live five years thinking she'd lost him, too.

"I'm so sorry," he gasps, hanging on to her for dear life. Tears well up in his eyes and breathing is suddenly hard again. "I didn't mean to. May, I didn't mean to."

But intentioned or not, he did this.

He went to space.

He died and left her alone.

Now Mr. Stark is dead.

Everything is wrong.

He did this.

May takes both of his hands in hers, shaking him a little. He's distantly aware that he's scaring her—even after Ben, even after Toomes, he's always been exceedingly careful not to break down in front of her like this. But he can't stop crying, sobbing, choking, not just now. It's too much.

"Hold on," she says, "Just—none of this is your fault, Peter. It's okay."

He doesn't believe her—not a little bit. But it would probably be easier for her if he did, and so he doesn't apologize again.

All he wants to do now is make things easier for her. It's too late for him, anyway.

* * *

When he popped off for his impromptu space/death trip, he and May had been fighting.

He'd almost managed to forget about it in the midst of battles and tragedies and general panic, but it's coming back to him now. He'd never fought with anyone the way he'd fought with her in the few months after she discovered his secret identity.

There had been arguing. There had been screaming and crying, more him than her—she was always spookily calm when pissed off. Then there was the authoritarian curfews, monitoring his calls with Mr. Stark, apprehending his suit, even chewing out Ned for being "complicit in his scheming, backstabbing deception and mad, desperate popularity stunts."

She'd used a lot of big, mean words to really get his guilt generator going—not that he ever really needed a lot of help with that. And if he acted tough around her, well, it was just so he didn't fall apart completely at the disasters that kept zeroing in on him and his miserable life, one after another.

At the time of the invasion, he'd only just negotiated being allowed to patrol again—a mere three nights a week, after she inspected every page of his homework to make sure he didn't miss a single question. Every time she saw him in the suit, she made disgusted noises, and this terrible expression came over her face, like she was about to either vomit or shriek with rage. They'd stopped eating dinner together, the one time of day they were both home even when she had the night shift. He can't even remember if he told her he loved her before he left for the field trip that day.

Since she pulled up beside the ruined compound, though, she's been smoothing her palms down the arms of his suit, running her fingers through his hair.

She's being so careful with him now.

After their legs fall asleep on the ground and something big blows up just a small hike from where they're sitting, she takes his hand and leads him back to the car, moving a pile of books and boxes off the front seat and trying to steer him into it. He flinches back.

"Wha—hold on, May, where are we going?"

She doesn't even hesitate. "Home."

For a second an organized list of arguments run through his mind, of all the reasons why he should stay, what he could do here. These are sort of his people, after all, even if they're not hers. But really, he hasn't helped much since he handed the gauntlet to New Glowing Lady. He's a sixteen-year-old kid who's been stumbling around, dazed out of his mind, and the sooner he's gone, the sooner someone competent can step up to take his place.

"I should tell someone," he finally says instead. "So they—so everybody knows I'm okay."

May thinks this over, then nods.

He'll tell Dr. Banner, he decides in a quick fifteen-second conversation with himself. He's part of the main group—if Dr. Strange or Miss Potts or somebody else is worried about him, Dr. Banner will surely hear about it and let them know. So now he just has to find him.

They set off in the direction of most of the action, where his super senses pick out the loudest whining of tech and the flashiest spandex. He has an iron grip on May's wrist—to keep her upright on the uneven dirt or ground himself?—and he has to remind himself that she can't move as fast as him and is also wearing low heels, that he has to walk at a reasonable pace.

She's pale, and there's already dirt streaked across her cheek, but she seems okay so far, he thinks.

God, she's incredible. He couldn't ask for a better aunt.

"Wait," May says just as that thought crosses his mind, throwing out an arm and giving him a small heart attack. He clutches his chest, gasping.

"_What_?"

His first thought is that she's seen a horribly mangled body, or maybe a lingering evil alien, something dark and scary that he should protect her from because he's a hero and that's probably what heroes do for their aunts. What she says instead, in a sort of strained voice, is, "Peter, is that _Thor_?"

He looks left. Sure enough, it is.

Despite everything else, Peter goes violently red, because, yeah—throughout his childhood, he was not exactly subtle about his massive crush on the Asgardian god. And yikes, May said that _really_ loudly.

Still, he pauses for just a minute to watch Thor do whatever it is he's doing. There's a lot of heavy lifting involved. Between the braided beard and the bulging muscles, Peter actually spends a few minutes not thinking about anything particularly traumatic.

Then Thor looks over and waves slightly, and Peter jolts back, mortified. Behind Thor, he swears he sees Hawkeye wink.

"Shut up," he hisses at May, who's chuckling under her breath.

They set off again.

Peter leads them a bit further, confident Dr. Banner is close now that they've seen other Avengers down at this end of the battlefield. And then, through the fog, he sees it—a small room, scrambled together from chunks of metal, isolated from the smoke and rain and threat of cameras in helicopters.

It's the place they've laid Mr. Stark.

This time it's Peter who stops in his tracks. When May notices the body, she doesn't look surprised—so they were reporting his death on the news. But her face still crumples, and she gives Peter's hand a squeeze.

"I'm so sorry, honey," she says.

Part of Peter wants to run to his side, to sit with him, to talk to him about what's happened, even. He remembers the random hug in the middle of the battle, the look in Mr. Stark's eyes. He remembers the sound of his last breath. He remembers the panic he felt when the other Avengers carried him away.

But Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes are with him now, Miss Potts stroking his face, Colonel Rhodes holding his damaged hand, Infinity Stones scattered, practically forgotten, at his feet. Captain America stands nearby, talking softly to people from SHIELD, people from Wakanda. The scene is peaceful. It's official. It's clearly not suffering from the lack of a child intern.

"I barely knew him," he says, shrugging off May's comforting hand. He flags down Dr. Banner, fends off a sympathetic look when he tells him he's turning tail and running away, and leads May back to the car without so much as a single tear escaping this time.


	6. Chapter 6

**Content warning: self harm. Sort of.**

* * *

Peter lays on his bed fading in and out of reality, absently spinning a copper wire back and forth and studying the hell out of a really interesting dust bunny on the ceiling.

It's a Tuesday morning—two days after the battle—but he's not at school, because no one has figured out what to do about a concept as mundane as education in this world where aliens invade and heroes lose and die and people disappear and reappear the same age five years later. He's pretty sure he's going to be repeating the majority of his junior year at some point, though, even though he remembers it like it was yesterday—because for him, it basically _was_.

It's bullshit. He should've stayed in space.

"Peter?"

He jolts at the sound of May's voice, too loud and too abrupt for his sensitive ears and foggy brain. A little whine starts somewhere in the back of his throat, but he chokes it away—he's not a child.

"What?" he calls back, just loud enough for her to hear.

"Come help me with this picture frame a second?"

That's fine. He can do that. He sets down the macgyvered alien blaster he's been tinkering with, pulls on his web shooters and a pair of pants, and creeps down the hall to where she stands in the kitchen.

He lingers there staring at the floor, honest to God almost forgetting why he came, until she coughs pointedly and he makes eye contact. Then her gaze drops to his wrists.

"I was thinking with command strips, not spiderly fluids," she says wryly.

Oh. The web shooters. He hadn't even noticed he put them on.

"Wha-no," he babbles, shaking his head. "This isn't—that wouldn't—the webs would dissolve anyway." He's halfway to hiding his wrists behind his back when he stops and realizes he hasn't actually done anything wrong, or even that weird, all things considered. He lowers his arms back down to his sides.

May's still glaring a little at the reminder of his superhero-ness—that particular instinct hadn't taken long to come back—and he resists the urge to roll his eyes as he takes the Velcro from her hands and squelches his way up the wall. She hasn't left him alone since they got back to the apartment—if he's in his room for more than twenty minutes at a time, she makes up some imaginary chore to get him to emerge. She's watching his every move like a hawk. He knows it'll only be a matter of time before she brings out one of her magic words: therapy. That's one thing about May—she loves to send him to therapy when things get rough.

Which is … it's probably a good thing, honestly, a really solid parental instinct there. But he doesn't need therapy for this. Not now. What he actually needs is a month-long nap, a magic memory wipe like in Men in Black, and maybe a nice vacation somewhere filled with trees and ponds, where all thoughts of dust and sand and choking smoke are nothing more than a distant memory.

Or pizza. He'd settle for pizza, too. But no, pizza is "tv food" and May wants to "talk", so she's been making limp salads and weird chunky French toast instead of ordering out.

He's trying to be sympathetic. After all, she thought he was dead for five whole years. But here he is literally climbing the walls from their collective anxiety, and all he knows is that he wants things to go back to normal.

"I have to go in to work this afternoon," May says as he balances the picture frame between two other frames he hung before he went to bed last night. There aren't even pictures in them yet, just grainy stock photos. "You'll be okay for a few hours, right?"

He nods as he makes his way back to the floor. "Yep." He gives the frame one more poke, then turns to retreat toward his room.

"Peter?" At May's voice, small and sad, he freezes. It suddenly hits him all over again—she thought he was dead for _five years_. He _was_ dead for five years.

He turns back around and wraps her in a hug instead.

"Everything's fine, May," he says. "I'm good. I'm here."

"I know," she whispers, smoothing his hair and pressing a kiss just above his ear. "I know. But—"

But sometimes knowing and _knowing_ are two very different things.

Finally, she gives a shaky chuckle and lets him go. "Okay," she says. "You're good. I've got to go shower if I'm gonna get to work on time."

She walks him back to his room on the way to the bathroom, because she doesn't want to be away from him any longer than necessary, which he can respect. Still, when they get to his door, he experiences a brief moment of panic before he manages to shove his weird glowing weapon-shaped thing out of sight under his pillow. If she doesn't like his web shooters, she definitely won't be the biggest fan of explosives scavenged from a battlefield. He'd been extra careful tucking the fragmented pieces among the junk in the backseat just as they left the ruined compound for that exact reason.

So he hides it before she gets a good look, and in the process, a sharp edge takes a chunk out of his thumb. He fakes a smile until May leaves, then licks the blood clean to get a good look at the damage.

His incredibly professional, experienced diagnosis: it's kind of deep, but it'll heal.

The question, though, is when?

And so, tuning out the white noise of the shower and the warbled notes of May's singing in the background, he watches it.

He expects—naturally—to feel vaguely upset at the sight of his own blood gushing from his fingertip. No matter how many times he gets the shit kicked out of him on the job, he's still squeamish when it comes to being injured. He's not uncomfortable this time, though, not really. Instead, he just feels overwhelmingly relieved as his skin starts to knit itself back together again, his healing factor more than a match for this mundane cut.

Five years ago, he and Mr. Stark had been in the middle of some rigorous testing of his healing factor. It was part of their lab time: sometimes they would make robots, sometimes they would program AI, and sometimes they would (scientifically) peel off a thin layer of his skin, stick it under a microscope, and measure what was going on in there.

It's unlikely that'll continue now—for one thing, the lab was destroyed, along with all of the records of their past work, and for another, it's ridiculous to think that somebody else has the time to worry about his genetic weirdness. He had always been surprised Mr. Stark found a few hours here and there.

It sucks, though. He'd always felt the least existential despair over his spider-ness when he knew somebody was keeping track of the mutation situation.

He watches the stream of blood trickle off and disappear and feels, for the first time since coming back into chaos, completely calm.

_Peter, stop_, he thinks. _That's fucking weird._

Yup—he definitely should've stayed in space.

* * *

"Explain it to me again."

Peter sits under his desk now, face in his mask even though it's like eighty degrees outside. May left around noon, and so he's been grilling Karen about the ins and outs of time travel for the past two hours.

The exact application of time travel to his current situation is far less clear now than it had been on the battlefield. Things that were wild or devastating or impossible to accept then have already started to shift into unalterable history. The whole thing is still fascinating to him, though, and as such it seems like a natural distraction.

Most of what Karen tells him, he already knows. She's barely even synced to Mr. Stark's systems anymore; she doesn't have the specs for the time machine and she doesn't have a record of what happened during the time heist. But she's patient, and sometimes she brings up a new angle—and if he's honest, sitting here letting her words wash over him, it's almost like it's Mr. Stark speaking to him in her voice.

He misses him. He really, really does.

This sucks.

"Theoretically, time can pass through a human as easily as a human can pass through time," Karen is saying in his ear. "This could, for example, cause reverse aging—or even age someone up, so they grow old right before your eyes."

"Interesting," Peter says. "But, relevant?"

"Absolutely," she replies. "You have to consider the simplistic technology your fellow scientists are likely to have at this time. The more primitive the tools you're working with, the more likely things like this can go wrong …"

"Hmm," Peter says noncommittally. He likes how she calls him a scientist, though. Karen wouldn't make him repeat junior year.

Before the AI can really get into her explanation, there's a knock at the front door. He whips the mask off and stuffs it between his knees like he's doing something wrong. Which he's not. Obviously.

Then he gets up and actually opens the door, because it's locked and May's at work and so whoever it is won't be coming in without that important step.

Whoever it is turns out to be Ned. Peter's breath catches.

Then he falls dramatically into Ned's arms.

He's texted Ned, of course, since everything happened. They've communicated enough to know they were both snapped, that they're both back, that they've returned to Earth (him) and researched what happened (Ned) and that they remain the same age and relative life skill level.

But between May's clinginess and Ned's big family trying to get back into a routine, they haven't actually seen each other for three days (five years?). It might be the longest they've ever been apart, besides Germany and Ned's summer vacations. And honestly, Peter hasn't completely believed Ned was okay until seeing him with his own eyes just now.

"I was gonna call you," Ned says into the top of Peter's head, "but then I was like, I'll just go over! Is that okay? I hope that's okay."

"It's fine," Peter says, and Ned pulls back and pats him on the shoulder.

Haltingly, Peter reaches out for their handshake, which Ned enthusiastically returns. Then they silently steer each other to Peter's bed, where they collapse in a pile.

Peter is perfectly capable of hearing Ned's heartbeat from across the room, but it's easier to believe it when he's got a death grip on his wrist. Ned actually rests his head on Peter's chest, presumably reassuring himself the same way. Peter thinks absently that things like this might be the reason people think they're weird, but death and destruction can do crazy things to a friendship. He's sure they'll be back to building legos and lightly cheating on homework within a few days, but for now, he's more than happy to chill like this.

"So what's up, man?" Ned finally asks, sitting and pulling Peter upright beside him.

Peter's got himself a running list of things that are "up," including but not limited to: _going to space, interactions with aliens, disintegration, battles of epic proportions_, and _death of a mentor_. But those all seem guaranteed to ruin the current not-horrible mood. So he digs his Alien Blaster™ out from under his pillow and plops that in Ned's lap instead.

"It's real," he says, " so don't fire it, obviously. But I thought you'd think it's cool."

"Did you find this?" Ned asks, eyes wide, as he gently runs his fingers across the buttons.

"I kind of built it. I found the pieces, though."

There's silence for a few minutes while Ned inspects the weapon and Peter studies some fading scabs on his fingers. When he looks up from that, though, it's to see Ned eyeing him warily over the abandoned alien tech. He frowns at him questioningly.

"Is something wrong?"

Ned flounders a bit, waving his arms, then figures out what he wants to say and spits it out. "I was just wondering—what can we talk about?"

Peter frowns. "I—whatever you want?"

"Oh, okay," Ned says, sighing with relief. "I just didn't know if there was anything you wanted to avoid…"

And, oh.

In retrospect, of course Ned wants to talk about the past few days. Ned didn't meet the Avengers, or go to space, or punch Thanos in the face, or watch Tony Stark die. From a distance, all of these things—well, except maybe the dying one—sound super cool.

They're not, though. And thinking about it now, Peter actually specifically doesn't want to talk about any of it.

"If you have questions, I'll answer them," he says anyway, albeit reluctantly, because Ned deserves that. He fully expects Ned to take him up on that immediately.

But Ned's staring at his right arm now, where there's a half-healed cut looping its way down the side of his hand.

Ned blinks a few times, squints suspiciously, then sucks in a breath. His thinking is practically in slow motion, Peter wants to scream from the suspense. "Hey Peter," he says finally, his voice high and strange, "what's that?"

Peter adjusts his sleeve, pulls it down to his fingertips. Luckily, he decided to put on one of Ben's old henleys even though it's so freaking hot. "It's a leftover. From the battle."

"Sure it is," Ned says, friendly and agreeable as always. "But … that was two days ago, and you don't have any other marks left from then. No bruises. No scars. So …"

Peter twitches. "So, what?"

Here's a fact about Peter: he hasn't been in many big battles where the stakes include his life before. He's never been to war. He's never actually thought very much about things like paranoia and PTSD and whatever else might come from experiences like that. But he's thinking now—and his interactions with May up to this point have only reinforced this opinion—that there's probably a sense of delicateness and tact that go along with these kinds of things. He's also thinking that there must be some kind of code about what to push on and what to let slide, and that it's probably best for everyone if Ned just magically knows it.

Spoiler: Ned does _not_ know it. Not at all.

He clears his throat and says it in a rush: "Peter, are you hurting yourself?"

And, yeah. He can see how this might look like that.

So here's the plan: laugh casually, show Ned that the mark is gone already (_haha, you must have imagined it, bro_), and then suggest watching_ Star Wars_ or … or, like, _Phantom of the Opera_, because that doesn't have space or wars in it. Boom. Distraction achieved.

Here's what actually happens: Peter giggles manically, and it sounds suspiciously like he's trying not to cry.

For the record, he's _not_ about to cry. He's fine.

But also, the mark is still there. More faded, but still there. And some of the smaller cuts on his fingers are … also still there, and very visible to close inspection. This healing factor thing is a lot more imprecise than he'd prefer.

So when he pulls his sleeve down, he's actually just flashing the scabs in Ned's face once more.

_For fuck's sake, Parker_.

"I promise I'm not, Ned," he says, backpedaling furiously. He should just stop planning in general—it never works out for him. "I promise. I'm just testing something."

"Testing?" Ned's voice is skeptical. "Testing what?"

"Um." _Um_. Will Ned get it? "How fast it gets better."

Ned blinks a few times, confusion clouding his expression. "So, like…"

Peter grabs his hands, ignoring the way Ned squirms uncomfortably. It's suddenly very important that Ned understands. "Look. I have super healing, right?"

"Right?"

"But what they never tell you in superhero training school is that super healing doesn't trump disintegration."

Ned finally succeeds in pulling gently away. "I don't—"

"It's a metaphor, Ned!" He forces himself to take a deep breath, because he knows he sounds crazy all of a sudden, but he's not—he's just practical. "Look. I'm testing, okay? To make sure I'm okay. And judging by this—" he waves his hand again, and the cuts are definitely more faded now "—right now, I am."

Ned nods understandingly for like thirty full seconds, then shakes his head and sighs. "That's fucked up, Peter."

Peter shrugs. "Well, so am I."

He's fine, though.

He is.

"Hey Peter?" Ned asks cautiously after a minute of quiet reflection. Peter looks up at him.

"Yeah?"

"Can you do something for me?"

Peter has plenty of things to ask of him later: Don't tell May. Don't tell MJ. Don't tell Miss Potts. Don't tell May. Don't tell Dr. Banner. Don't take his alien weapon away. Don't tell May. So this is only fair, after all. "Of course."

"Okay—just, repeat after me: My body is not a science experiment."

And, nope. Ned really doesn't get it at all.

He tries to take deep breaths, tries to stay calm. But there are too many things—too much he's had to deal with on his own. And so maybe he yells, just a little. "My body is a fucking science experiment, Ned! That's the problem."

His voice cracks on that one. His nose starts to run. And Ned, bless his heart, just pulls him into a hug and keeps him there, until it's over and he feels more or less chill again.

"I'm sorry," he says softly when Peter's almost calm. "I'm sorry you feel like that's true."

Peter's sure he still doesn't get it, not really. There's no way he understands what it's like to spend an entire week convinced you're dying, to actually write a letter saying goodbye to your only remaining family, only to wake up the next morning feeling perfectly fine, except for the fact that you're stuck to the wall. He'll never know what it's like to accidentally wake up in the middle of surgery, paralyzed but painfully aware, or to hear every whisper and see every burst of light and smell every molecule of perfume around you so vividly that your head feels like it's splitting in two from the inside out. He'll never be targeted by mad scientists for his abilities, or have to worry that he'll age differently from everyone around him, or that his DNA will unravel quicker because it's new and different and wrong.

Ned may have crumbled to dust too, but he didn't feel it, and he obviously doesn't remember it like Peter does.

But he doesn't say any of that. They've only just gotten each other back, and he doesn't want to fight.

"Let's just watch a movie," he says instead. Ned nods. And just like that, his disaster of a plan is magically back on track.

When they're a few minutes in, popcorn popped and lights dimmed, Ned lowers the volume and hums to get Peter's attention. The brief silence that follows, filled with the heaviness of preparation, tells Peter he's been sitting on this speech a while.

Finally, just when Peter's about to prompt him, he speaks.

"You know. There are easier ways to test your healing factor—like, with a microscope. You could extract like, one cell from your arm. You could drool in a cup. You could even pee in a cup, if you wanted."

Peter snorts, but reaches out and links their pinkie fingers together. "Ned, I don't want to pee in a cup."

"If you wanted, I said."

"Well, I don't," Peter says firmly.

Ned rolls his eyes. "Fine. Don't pee in a cup." Then he straightens up, turns to look Peter right in the eyes. "What I mean is—"

"I get it," Peter says, mostly to cut the conversation off. He's over his scientist days, anyway. He's just going to run a cat rescue when he grows up. "No more testing—not without a lab."

"And professionals."

There are no professionals when it comes to his body, not anymore at least. But he agrees anyway, because it's easiest. "You got it."

Satisfied, Ned turns back to the movie, but all Peter can think is one more echo of, _You should have stayed in space._

He's happy to be back with May, of course. And don't get him wrong—he's so, so glad Ned is here.

But he bets that in space, the aliens wouldn't have asked him weird, invasive questions. They would probably help him with his tests, too.

Maybe then he wouldn't be so scared all the time.


	7. Chapter 7

Present day.

* * *

Peter sits alone in his room, freshly-showered but still picking at phantom dust on his skin, and thinks about what it means to condemn someone to death. To condemn many someones to death. To condemn yourself to death.

And not just that, but knowingly.

He's been in the business of saving people for so long—basically as far back as he can casually remember, at this point—that he hasn't really given much thought to such a nightmarish hypothetical before. If someone would happen to die on his watch, you'd better believe he did everything in his power to stop it. He's experienced failures of his physical ability, and of his instincts, and even his intelligence. He's beaten himself up plenty about these occasions. He's always been sure, though, that there were never any ethical shortcomings to blame.

And even then, nobody's ever, like, died _permanently_—not even bad guys. He's far too good for that. And he's got unbelievably skilled backup.

But what if your priorities change?

MJ's deeper forays into the realm of the philosophical have always annoyed him more than anything. He's never cared about trolley problems; his plan was to save everyone, or maybe die trying. That was _who he was_. There was never any prioritizing, any convenient shortcut or automated Instant Kill, that he could imagine himself being okay with.

All of a sudden, though, he feels there might be some real merit in trying to puzzle out the value of one life as compared to others.

Not for the first time, he notes that some kind of planning _before_ doing crazy drastic things is not a terrible idea. He's always been acquainted with the concept of consequences, since long before Ben, but it does seem like they're becoming harder and harder to stomach these days. If he thought everything through before as seriously as he is now, would he have done the same thing? Would he have risked everything?

Probably.

_Absolutely_.

Hey—at least he's honest with himself, right?

"Did you develop x-ray vision and forget to tell me?" May asks from the doorway. For a second he's confused—it doesn't help that he didn't actually hear her coming for once—but, oh. He must be staring into space again.

_Ha. Space._

"No," he says dully. Her grin slips a little, and he remembers he's trying to act like nothing's wrong, so he forces a smile of his own. "That would be cool, though."

"Whatcha thinkin' about?" she asks him, squatting down beside him on the floor. Where he's sitting. Under his desk.

_Be normal, Peter._

"Nothing."

May tugs him out from under the desk, and he lets her, even though she could never budge him if he decided he didn't want to be moved. He's not that heavy—he's actually lighter than the average seventeen year old, especially now—but he's found he can counter that unfortunate fact by throwing all of his strength against whoever's trying to drag him around. Part of him—and instinctual part, probably, that's already paralyzed at the thought of being caught and found and forced to suffer consequences—wants to fight her now. But he forces himself to go limp, lets her resettle him on the bed.

When he's seated, she cuts right to the chase.

"Did something happen last night?" she asks. He blinks.

"What?"

"You were …" She sighs, runs a hand through her hair; she's frustrated. "I thought you were getting better."

"Nothing happened, May." God, when did she become so perceptive? Wait, actually—she's always been this perceptive. But usually, it's about things he secretly wants to talk about, or at least needs to.

Now, it's different—nothing good can come from this conversation. This he knows for sure. But May has no idea, of course.

"Well, it seems like something's wrong today," she says.

He just hums noncommittally. She doesn't push him—if he was thinking more clearly, he'd definitely remember to love that about her.

"So, do you want to go work in the lab?" she asks, her tone gentle but encouraging. Firm. She thinks she knows what's best for him—and who knows, maybe she would, if she was aware of what exactly has been going on. "You were so enthusiastic about whatever you were doing there these past few weeks. Or—patrol. Do you want to go out on patrol? Where's your suit?"

Well, since she asked: his Iron Spider suit is locked away in a titanium case at the back of his closet because he doesn't want to smell the sulfur and stale blood pouring off it in waves, and his other suit is still in Harley's backpack, because sometimes diversions and alibis are inconvenient when the plotting is all said and done. So that's out.

And anyway, he doesn't exactly feel very heroic at present.

"I think I'm actually just gonna get some rest, May," he says in a soft voice. "There's been a lot going on lately. Maybe it's just all finally sinking in."

She likes that, the therapist-speak of dealing with emotions and understanding the natural progression of happenings and fallouts. It makes him sound balanced and mature—two things he's not necessarily been emulating recently, but if he were her, he might be projecting that for personal comfort, too. She rests her hand on his head for a moment, then stands.

"Let me know if you need anything," she whispers. He nods into his pillow, and then she's gone.

As she leaves, his phone lights up. Tony has been texting him all day—a lot of serious messages to check in after Peter's earlier meltdown and reassure himself that Peter's still around (the snap reversal wasn't that long ago for him, after all). Tony doesn't know it—or at least, not the full extent of it—but this is actually a reassurance that Peter needs, too. He'll probably never tell him, but he's grateful for the periodic excuses to touch base. To remind himself that at least something is better off, rather than worse.

Since it's Tony, there has been a fair share of not-so-serious messages, too. Peter doesn't feel particularly inclined to laugh right now, but the billionaire has definitely gotten a few reluctant chuckles out of him today. At a glance he can see that the newest messages would definitely fall into this category, if they didn't echo of dangerous secrets in the gaps between knowledge.

**Tony:** hey kid, who all worked on operation 'bring iron man back'

**Tony:** aka who at SHIELD knows I'm alive?

**Tony:** why doe autocorrect to all caps and IRON MAN doesn't?

**Tony:** does fury know?

Peter's not sure why exactly he would need to know that information, but he's pretty confident that it's probably for chaotic reasons. Well, far be it from him to disappoint. It's nice to be able to tell the truth about something.

**Peter:** Iron Man isn't an acronym

**Peter:** Fury doesn't know it was all very secretive

**Peter:** I honestly couldn't even tell you the names

He could, of course. There's just three: Peter Parker, Harley Keener, and Clint Barton. Short, sweet, and easy to remember. Easy to catch. Easy to punish.

But he tries not to think about that.

**Tony:** great news. thanks kid!

Is it great news, though?

* * *

That first night—the first night he sleeps, anyway, when Tony is awake and things are settled—he dreams of Morgan Stark.

Off and on, he dreams of everybody he loves—that itself isn't anything special. He dreams of them falling off the ferry, crushed by falling cars in the churning, unforgiving water. He dreams of them trapped under collapsing buildings, falling in fiery plane crashes, hunted down by the Vulture's henchmen, picked off by aliens. May's eyes are empty, Tony's skin is streaked with dark scars, Ben is in an alleyway with bullet holes oozing in his chest, Happy is burned beyond recognition from an unexpected explosion. Ned has drowned under a parachute in a lake, MJ's skull is crushed by falling concrete, and even Flash appears on occasion—one time, he watched Flash get kidnapped by a tall man in a dark mask, tortured for his Instagram account, for his treasured pictures of Spider-man. He can still hear those horrible screams.

He dreams of them falling from the sky, and though he throws himself after them with no regard for his own safety, he's always too slow to save them. Sometimes his web snaps. Sometimes it catches, and they hit the ground anyway. Sometimes, their necks even break in midair when he stops them too quickly. In these scenarios, he knows the bad guy didn't kill them—he did.

But when he dreams of Morgan slowly disintegrating to dust even as he scrambles to hold her together, it's—well, there's a first time for everything.

They're sitting by the lake, not at a funeral or an important meeting about wills and bequests, just hanging out enjoying the sunshine. Being a (somewhat unexpected) farm kid, Morgan loves sunshine—sometimes, like here, it's like she's made of it. She's humming, and he's about to put down the book that's in his lap and start braiding her hair. There are little yellow flowers blooming at their feet, and somewhere above, a bird is chirping.

It's peaceful, perfect even, but for some reason the hairs on the back of his neck are starting to prickle.

He blinks, then has to blink again, because there's suddenly something in his eye. And is it just him, or is it getting darker?

Beside him, Morgan lets out a little whimper. "Peter," she says haltingly, voice high-pitched, panicked. "Peter, help."

Then: "I don't feel so good."

And, oh _God_.

_Oh God._

He knows what this means.

He wants to rush to her, to help her, but he finds he can only move in slow motion. He watches her fingertips disappear, then her arms, and he catches a handful of what used to be her tiny body in his fist, feeling the grit rub raw scratches in his skin. He presses against her chest, as though he can halt this, keep her safe—but she crumbles beneath him, spilling onto the grass. He's never seen long dark hair simultaneously whip through a harsh breeze and dissolve before, but he can describe it perfectly now: it's like watching trails of blackish blood churning through unsettled water, individual drops wrenched apart by cold uncaring waves.

"This is all your fault," she tells him now, just a disembodied face with these new angry words, words that sound so eerie and wrong coming from the mouth of such a small, sweet girl.

And then she's gone.

_It's just a dream,_ he tells himself when he wakes, sweating and crying and trying not to throw up. _It's not real._ But in his heart, he knows the truth—that somewhere, sometime, it is.

Peter had a mantra, when things got hard these past six weeks. It went something like this: _I'm doing everything for her._ He was so deeply convinced that Morgan needed a father. She needed to grow up in a world that still believed in the power of heroes. He owed it to her to give her that.

Sure, his Morgan isn't dead now. She's actually got everything. But somewhere, someone else's Morgan is. And that's all his fault.

Needless to say, he doesn't sleep much after the dream.

He's not actually sure he'll ever sleep again.

* * *

**The next chapter is ready, I'm just holding it hostage until I get some comments :)**


	8. Chapter 8

**I am definitely a pantser, not a plotter, so I have no clue if this two-chapters-of-past, one-chapter-of-present thing is actually working anymore. But goddamn it, I am committed now.**

* * *

Five weeks earlier.

* * *

In his life so far, Peter has been to nine birthday parties, two weddings, several bar mitzvahs, and more funerals than he can count on two hands.

Most of the birthday parties were Ned's, and, if he's being honest, consisted of just the two of them. He's told he was the ring bearer for Ben and May just after he learned to walk, though he can't actually remember that, and in ninth grade he sat in the back row while some cousin of Ned's married the CEO of an essential oils company because he was promised free food afterwards. As for the funerals, well, he was blessed with a large number of much older relatives: three sets of grandparents with lots of siblings (he counts May's parents, of course), et cetera. Most of those services were stuffy and boring, and he was really young—he's mostly blocked them out.

At Ben's funeral—the one he can still picture most vividly—a weird priest that smelled very strongly of bologna had droned on and on about the things people owed God and how God answered to no man, and wasn't it nice that Ben had liked baseball so much? It had been so, so painful to hear him ramble. The man hadn't known Ben at all.

His parents' funeral had been a fleeting, closed-casket affair, dark and rainy and miserable. He remembers crying a lot, almost choking on a pretzel, and being clutched to the ample, perfumed chests of a lot of sympathetic Science Coworkers' wives.

This funeral, then—the one for Mr. Stark and Natasha Romanoff at some cottage by a lake—is by far the nicest he's ever attended. It's quiet, reflective. Personal to a fault. And honestly, that makes it far harder to handle in the end.

Happy says a few words before getting too choked up to continue. Miss Potts, goddess that she is, makes it through a ten-minute speech without shedding so much as a tear. Colonel Rhodes has arranged some sort of mock military tribute, which perfectly honors everything Mr. Stark did while still being sarcastic enough that the man would've loved it. There are flowers, and familiar faces, and based on the smells coming out of the cottage, the food is going to be way better than it has any business being on a somber occasion such as this.

And then—_and then_—a tiny, dark-haired child named Morgan, who somehow, unfathomably, has Mr. Stark's smirk and Mr. Stark's eyes along with the tiny black bow atop her tiny sweet head, whispers something far too close to the microphone, and time stops.

Peter's brain short-circuits. He can't even begin to focus on puzzling out whatever it was that she said.

"May," he hisses, jolting her with his elbow just a little harder than he should've, what with his super strength and all. In his defense, he's panicking. "May, who the hell is that?"

"Oh," she says, sniffing delicately. "I thought you knew. That's Tony's daughter."

Peter almost falls over.

Suddenly, he's picking up on things he completely failed to notice before. That's one of Mr. Stark's old cars parked at the end of the driveway—so this must be his cabin. Miss Potts—Mrs. Stark?—has a small, tasteful ring on her finger. There are plastic toys scattered across the porch, along with a tire swing in the yard, and a child-sized tent slumps almost out of sight across the clearing.

Maybe he should have been watching the news, searching the internet, instead of just hiding in his room all this time. He clearly has a lot of catching up to do.

"Morgan," he whispers, just to himself. He studies her.

Well, _that's_ a thing.

* * *

He meets Morgan in person a half-hour later, when Miss Potts calls him from May's side into a small sitting room beside the kitchen. Well, it's not that small. But it's not a cavern in a mansion or an entire floor in compound, either, and so he's having a hard time reconciling the Mr. Stark he knew with a person who would be happy living here, alone with just his family, for five years.

"Morgan, sit down," Pepper says over her shoulder as Peter comes through the door and stops short. "Don't get baked beans on the sofa. Peter, honey, I have something to show you."

And Peter doesn't answer, because he's too busy watching the tiny child rub her spoon across the beige blanket on the arm of a nearby chair.

"How—how old is she?" he chokes out finally, after Miss Potts has wrestled the spoon and plate of beans from Morgan's hands and replaced them with a neat, non-goopy dinner roll.

"Almost five," Miss Potts says, just as Morgan holds up four fingers. Her eyes bore into his, almost challengingly, and he doesn't know what to do. Is he supposed to say something to her? Give her a hug? Should he have brought some kind of present? Somehow, he'd never expected her to notice him.

"Almost five," he whispers. He's acting like an idiot. It's like he's never seen a kid before—and, just through Ned's siblings alone, he most definitely has.

Miss Potts takes pity on him. "Morgan," she says in a strangled voice, like she's trying not to laugh, "please say hi to Peter."

"Hi," Morgan says, around a mouthful of bread, and then she grins mischievously—in that moment, she looks so much like Mr. Stark it's unreal. She swallows. "Spider-man."

Then she rolls off the couch and runs from the room, shrieking for Happy all the way.

"She's incredible," Peter breathes, as if that's a normal thing to say about a toddler you just met trying to out your secret identity.

"She's something all right," Miss Potts says, shaking her head. She stares after her daughter fondly, and for a moment, some of the sadness lifts.

It doesn't go very far, though. This is a funeral, after all.

"Is she—" He doesn't know what he's asking. _Is she sad? Is she okay?_ Does he even want to bring this up, start this conversation? But somehow, Miss Potts understands anyway.

"She hasn't really grasped what's going on, I don't think," she says slowly, looking away. "Last night, she asked when Daddy was coming home. But she's smart—she knows something is different." She swallows hard, and it takes her a moment to continue. "She's been making me breakfast in the mornings—just like Tony used to."

That's a fun experience Peter's uncomfortably familiar with. He can still picture the tiny guest room in the apartment May and Ben had when he first went to stay with them, the dim lights and hushed voices of that horrible phone call, the way the rain lashed against the foggy windows as they rattled from the thunder, even as he huddled under the covers of a bed that was at least three sizes too big for him. _Why can't Mommy tuck me in? Is Daddy coming back soon? Did they forget about me?_

"I was around her age when my parents died," he blurts out suddenly, as if that's remotely helpful. As if he's going to follow it up with, _And I turned out okay!_, or, _Now we'll have something to bond over!_

There's nothing about his life situation that feels okay right now. And he doesn't even remember his parents, not really. But he's obviously not going to tell Miss Potts that.

She quickly moves on from this whole thread of conversation, thank God, because he doesn't really want to dwell on it.

"So, first of all, here's this," she says, handing him a stack of papers. Then she steers him into a chair, as if she knows he's going to need to be sitting to actually comprehend what she's given him. "It's all digital, of course, but I thought having something tangible, to hold—" She trails off, shrugging.

He handles the pile carefully, begins to leaf through the files. What he finds there is … it's wild. There are pages and pages and even more pages of Spider-man suit designs—different shapes, different textures, different features, different sizes. One filters air for up to four-hour stints underwater. One can hypothetically withstand higher temperatures than he'd ever encounter on Earth. There's even one for if he decides to spontaneously gain fifty pounds—_for when that crazy diet finally catches up with your super metabolism_, he sees scrawled in the bottom corner in shimmering purple ink. He figures the offending gel pen, despite being utilized by Tony, belonged to Morgan.

That's not it, either—there are new Spider-man logos, different color combinations, rough outlines of a Spider-man inspired plane, and something that looks suspiciously like pajamas.

He's never seen so many Spider-man related designs in one place, not even in that store on Broadway that carries all the superhero merch during Halloween season. And they had Spider-man socks _and_ shot glasses last year. (Ned bought both.)

"How have you been holding up, Peter?" Pepper asks as he reads on. There are also lists of materials in here, maps to private storehouses and storage units, specs of nanotech-assembling technology with secret alien-designed enhancements that would make building everything possible. "Are you adjusting? Is your aunt okay? Are the nightmares bad?"

"I haven't—" He stops, because his throat is burning. She's been around this superhero life so long, she knows exactly what to ask. He can't get into these things now, though, so he redirects. "These are for me? You're sure?"

"It's everything about you he had," she says, a sad smile playing over her lips. She says this as if it's only a few notes—as if there wasn't enough here for several entire books. "He's worked on it off and on over the years. Some of it probably looks familiar—a lot is from back when he'd run tests with you. But …" she sighs. "He always had such big dreams for you, Spidey."

"Um." If only Peter wasn't a gross crier. But even when he doesn't let the tears fall, the runny nose and itchy eyes and horrible grating voice are things he can't just will away. "Thanks."

Now perched on the couch, Miss Potts still hasn't given up her investigation into his wellbeing. "Have you been out on patrol lately? Does everything—your suit, your webs—still feel okay?"

"I … I haven't." He feels almost shameful admitting this, although he's done nothing wrong—May wants him home, and he hasn't found it in his heart to leave her. And, heck, he's just a seventeen-year-old kid who recently died. He has nothing to be ashamed of. "Not yet."

Pepper just nods. "I'm glad you've been keeping safe, of course," she says. "I just … wasn't sure that would be enough."

He's not sure how to interpret that, exactly.

"I know your type," she continues with a wry smile. "God knows I married it. Anyway—" she leans over to press something else into his hand, a small flash drive, "—here's this, too."

He turns it over. It's tiny, practically the size of his fingernail, and it's unmarked—there's not even a Stark Industries brand etched on the side. "What is it?"

"Some kind of digital lab," she says slowly. "He used to back it up every few days, just in case. I don't know half of the projects that are on there, but he knew you'd be able to figure it out." She chuckles. "The potential patents alone should take care of college, at least. Sorry you have to work a little for it."

So Mr. Stark—whose daughter literally just left the room—is going to be paying for Peter, his random intern, to go to college.

Mr. Stark designed all of these things to share with Peter, when he'd never design anything for Miss Potts or Morgan or Happy or Colonel Rhodes or, well, anyone, again.

How is that possible? How is that right?

Peter feels a weird whooshing in his head, something loud and overwhelming that he desperately needs to get away from. Suddenly, this is all too much. "I… I can't take this," he stammers, trying to hand it back.

"Of course you can."

He shakes his head. "I can't."

Pepper stands, all business now. "He wanted you to have it, Peter, so just take it."

"But I barely even knew him!" He's trying not to whine, trying not to shout, trying to be grateful and polite and everything that Miss Potts deserves as she bravely carries out this difficult, unnecessary task. He shouldn't be in this position. She shouldn't be in this position. They're all just doing their best.

He knows right away that he's said something wrong, though. Almost instantaneously, she whirls towards him with a dangerous glint in her eye. "He died for you!"

And maybe Peter's hearing isn't working correctly all of a sudden, because she can't have said what he thinks she just said.

"I'm sorry." Pepper presses her palms to her eyes, takes a few calming breaths. "I didn't mean that, obviously."

"He … what?"

"It's nothing," she says. "Please take the flash drive. I have to be getting back out there."

Peter jumps up and physically blocks her path to the door, because he can't think of anything else to do. Well, he could talk to her, but that's not working out for him so well right now. "Wait—Miss Potts—Mrs. Stark?"

"Pepper, please, Peter," she interrupts, which does _not_ answer that question, but there are far bigger issues now.

"What did you mean by that?" He can't stop his voice from cracking now. In a minute, that's going to be the least of his problems when the real crying starts.

Pepper turns away, walks back to the window. He doesn't follow her. "None of this is your fault, Peter," she says. Without seeing her face, there's no way to tell how hard it is for her to say that, how much she's lying to the both of them. He can tell she's using her CEO voice now, though. "Nothing is your fault. But Tony bet a lot of things on his last mission, and he was betting most of it for you. _On_ you."

So—she thinks Tony's death is his fault.

So maybe Tony's death _is_ his fault.

He can see it clearly now, what he never considered before. The Tony who lived here in this place—who woke up and made breakfast for his gorgeous powerful wife, who played with his daughter by a beautiful lake, who spent a few minutes watering the garden and feeding the random alpaca out back before bed—he would balk at the mere thought of inviting monsters and death and destruction back into his peaceful life. He wouldn't step into a volatile, barely-tested time machine. He wouldn't go looking to undo something that brought him so much unexpected happiness.

The only reason he'd give this up—the only way he'd leave his wife and his kid and his peaceful, danger-free existence—was if he thought he was getting something he missed, something he felt responsible for, in return.

_Peter_.

"I'm so sorry," he stammers, jumping back to get as far out of Pepper's way as possible as she makes another go at the door. "I didn't know—"

"Look, just do what you do best, kid," she says. "Save the day. And sometimes, maybe, think about him when you do."

The rest of the funeral is a blur, but he probably deserves that.

_What has he done?_

That's not the real question, though. The question he should be answering now—the one he has to turn his full attention to—is this: What can he do to fix it?

It's up to him, after all. It's clear that everyone else has already given up.

He breaks it down logically—or, well, in a way that would have sounded crazy two weeks ago, but that seems normal enough now. So, he breaks it down in a way that reflects the times: He doesn't know how to bring Mr. Stark back from the dead—it's probably impossible, actually—so that's out of the question. He doesn't know how to make a new one, either, and he doubts Mr. Stark would have left enough of his consciousness lying around in various AI to let that happen, at least not convincingly.

That leaves stealing a Mr. Stark from somewhere else, then. From somewhen else. Time travel.

But he doesn't know how to build a time machine, or work it, or how to get back even if he did.

_Come on, Peter. Think_.

_I'm returning the Infinity Stones_. Bruce Banner said that to him on the battlefield, as he was scavenging parts of the first time machine—the one he was planning on reassembling, and using.

Peter does know how to find out where the Avengers are doing whatever they're doing. He knows how to make himself valuable, make himself trusted, and make himself small and forgettable enough that he's not noticed if he doesn't want to be.

Maybe he doesn't have to do this alone after all.

* * *

**I know lots of people headcanon Peter as Jewish, and honestly I do too, but I am not Jewish and don't know anything about Jewish funerals so I decided to go with what I know. I would love to change this in the future as I continue to educate myself.**


End file.
